


nothing fades like the light

by unofficial_channels



Category: Justified, The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe, Apocalypse, Body Horror, Dark, Horror, Illnesses, Literature, Multi, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Post-Apocalypse, The Stand AU no one asked for, Vegas is Harlan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:20:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21827362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unofficial_channels/pseuds/unofficial_channels
Summary: He dreams of Harlan.Harlan offers refuge of shadow. It ain’t as bright as Florida, and it may smell like coal but at least it ain’t the dead. It is its own entity in the fields of his dreams and it stands patiently for him as it ever has. It’s empty.Waiting.
Relationships: Ava Crowder/Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens, Ava Crowder/Raylan Givens, Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens, Randall Flagg/Boyd Crowder, Raylan Givens/Winona Hawkins
Comments: 16
Kudos: 23





	1. do not go quietly unto your grave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swearwollf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swearwollf/gifts).



It started as a cold. 

If it wasn’t the feds that brought it in, it was their runaways. Pretty soon the whole office was a cesspit of sniffle and sneeze that never recovered. Their sick leave took them home, never to return again. Raylan Givens was no exception.

The CDC wasn’t far, geographically, and it encouraged the population to take precautions as one would when encountering the flu. Masks, no sharing food or drink, washing hands frequently as possible, keeping away from touching the face, staying home when your symptoms are contagious. 

It should’ve worked, in theory. Raylan had no reason to think otherwise.

But like the rest of the country, his condition worsened until it developed into what they were calling Captain Trips on every news outlet. By the time he tried to call in for a temporary leave of absence, the phone rang off the hook until it rang endlessly. Raylan stopped calling after that. No one came in to check on him, but he was too damn sick to think anything of it. He’d never been this sick in his life. He swelled. He couldn’t breathe for the mucus pooled in his lungs. The tube neck was the worst of it. He spoke in mucus and cursed at Arlo and cried at Aunt Helen for nothing. 

He ain’t ever been a religious man - lord, not after the shit his daddy made him witness to - but in the few lucid throes of Captain Trips, he wanted nothing more than a speedy road to whatever afterlife would welcome him. He’d tried to be good, and had spent a good long while repenting for the dissolution of his marriage, and for leaving Boyd in that holler, and that had to count for something - ‘sides, he was pretty sure he’d already been to hell and couldn’t nothin’ be any worse than that. If he had to die here this fucking undignified (and he could make peace with that, so long as he didn’t have to live through any more of this), _at least_ , he thought, _at_ least _it won’t be in Harlan._  
  
\---  
  
He never did. 

By some miracle (it occurred to him, ruefully, that maybe all the afterlives wanted nothing to do with him), the swelling reduced, his fever broke, and Raylan took unobstructed breath for the first time in two weeks. But the same could not be said of his fellow marshals - not one of them returned. By the time he saw fit to return to work, the office was no longer used for returning federal fugitives so much as it became about putting out local fires. Local law enforcement struggled with martial law - Miami was too fucking big for the dwindling number of police they had left at that point. 

To his surprise, his case was all but unheard of - people were dying en masse, but they weren’t dying in hospitals like they ought. They went too quick for that. Most were lucky, he learned, if they made it 48 hours following incubation. They started dying in their high-rise condos, their upscale apartments, out in public and it became a public crisis no amount of public relations could wrangle. It wasn’t just a local pandemic: it was a national epidemic. Hospitals never stood a chance. 

Miami stank.

After a point, the streets became clogged with bodies and cars attempting to escape. Highways became unusable. Local streets, even. Everything closed. Residences were being raided by anyone still alive, and he tried for a time to stop them before he truly understood how futile his effort was, and then they weren’t. Firearms became coveted. Fugitives fled as they were wont to and operations became slim until they became just about nothing at all.

Phone lines went down. He could call for no one. He knew of no one he could call anymore, anyway.  
  
\---  
  
Now, he dreams. They start in a way that scare him like nothing else in this world that had gone to hell in a hand basket did. Not the bulbous necks and eyes that bulge from the sockets so far that many of them had fallen out or hung by strings of mucus, not the ugly phlegm so thick that its victims choked to death in their sleep like the worst of overdoses, not the purple faces or the rotted flesh in the heat of Miami summer. 

He dreams of Harlan.

Harlan offers refuge of shadow. It ain’t as bright as Florida, and it may smell like coal but at least it ain’t the dead. It is its own entity in the fields of his dreams and it stands patiently for him as it ever has. It’s empty.

Waiting.

Raylan stops coming into the office when he becomes its sole sentinel. On his decided last day as a government sanctioned U.S. Deputy Marshal, he busts into the evidence locker (not that he needs to, its keeper and all of its security measures are dead or ineffective) and collects the remaining weapons and money for all the good it will do. He thinks he doesn’t know where he’s going, only that he has to go.

He adjusts his Stetson and goes north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Following chapters will get longer, as those will be the meat of this story.
> 
> Chapter title taken from The Mammals.


	2. for every mouthful

“ _Get me the fuck outta here!_ ” Boyd screams fruitlessly into the chasm of was once a prison. It’s rich, he thinks with mad, hysterical laughter, that he should die in Alderson for a white-collar crime when he could be in prison for simply blowing shit up. Fuck, war crimes, even. But here he is, with the dead rich and the dead women and it don’t matter who they are anymore, ‘cause they’re deader than hell and ain’t nothin’ gonna bring them back.

He expected to go with them - it’d be poetic justice, wouldn’t it? Just a dumb fucking jarhead rotting in a women’s prison for some commie ideals. He don’t owe this country shit, not anymore, he did his time and then some. But he’s here, too alive and yet still dying. Wasting away with the rest of them. His would just be slower, more painful.

Food grew scarce until it stopped coming altogether. It left the hysterical, already teetering on the edge of death, unbearable to listen to. Boyd was an old hand at dearth; his own daddy saw to that well enough. But the rich had no such practice. Lucky him, to have been born in the hollers of Harlan. They’d been hysterical, not anywhere close to lucid in their final hours. The screaming was the worst of it until they had no breath with which to scream again. Many didn’t know where they were anymore. Some, he thought, were lucky: they knew enough to know it was prison they were in, but not why.

The infirmary was overrun with them, so much so that the doctors couldn’t treat them fast enough. And then no one cared. Fewer taxpayer dollars to spend on fewer bodies, but more work on the healthy boys like Boyd. After awhile it didn’t matter because Boyd wasn’t stupid. Pennies for his labor didn’t matter in the world outside, and certainly wouldn’t matter on the outside if the whole country was this diseased.

Then the dreams began.

Boyd could never see His face except for that terrible, terrible smile. At first He searched. It gave Boyd the feeling he was the object The Man With No Face was looking for. It didn’t matter where he was in dreamland, always he was being looked for. Eyes he couldn’t see swept over Appalachia, over the ragged line of mountains, through the trees, and finally honed in. 

Something was coming, and nothing great enough could stop it.

He was always going somewhere. It never mattered to Boyd, because even in his dreams he followed The Man With No Face. And he knew, instinctively, they were walking toward Harlan. The darkness of those hollers closed in on him and when he woke, it was always in a sweat, eyes never straying from the corners of his cell until the light settled over him enough that Boyd was sure it wasn’t there anymore.

West Virginia was still too close to Kentucky, but a stone’s throw from Harlan County.

For awhile he hoped he’d die before his nightmares became reality. But disease never took him like it took everyone else. Boyd never acquired the racking cough, never even felt feverish. It made him feel mad in the way fevers make the ill mad. _Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you **fuck you**_ he screamed into his cell until he was too tired to stand anymore. 

Spared, but not by God.

It comes as no surprise, then, when he hears footsteps followed by a whistle at the long end of the hall - indistinct at first before it grows closer and forms into a recognizable tune he could sing along to in his sleep. Hunger strains his agility and Boyd struggles to sit up, much less cross the cell to the bars and see what’s what. 

He thinks he knows already. 

He hopes he doesn’t. He’s been so long without stimulation or food or water that maybe he’s just going fucking crazy, people hear shit all the time. Sometimes, down a shaft-

Boyd sees the boots before anything else, and it takes every ounce of moxie he’s got left to look up. 

He has a face this time. There’s an exchange of recognition between them and Boyd bites back a scream.

“Well I’ll be damned. There lives one after all!”

The contrast between them is stark, and although isolation has slowed his cognition a bit, it doesn’t escape him - Boyd with his wild hair and nothing but a hanger for his inmate jumpsuit if he had to guess what he looks like now, and Him sporting a suit and tie. He looks like a company man, so generic Boyd could’ve found him on the other side of the picket line all those years ago.

Maybe he has.

“I gotta say, old Flagg’s feeling blessed today! I didn’t think I was gonna find fuck all in this place, to tell you the truth. Actually, wasn’t even sure what I heard was quite real.” Like a shotgun, Flagg fires off a smile so cheerfully serrated that Boyd freezes. He isn’t certain of much right now, being on the brink of death as he is, but he is certain he hadn’t said that out loud.

When uncharacteristically Boyd doesn’t actually reply, Flagg prompts him. “Well shit, son, how long you been in for?”

He ain’t seen outside in the better part of two weeks, if he has to hazard a guess. Time passes in this cell the way it does in the mines, which is to say: unbearably. Something about the way Flagg looks at him says He already knows that, has too much information already. “Too long, Sir, too long,” Boyd replies instead and relieves his bony face against the bars. Flagg nods His sympathy and brings to His mouth a half-eaten drum of fried chicken that Boyd can’t manage to pull his eyes away from. Offhandedly, he realizes he can’t remember seeing it upon their meeting before his stomach audibly rumbles and kills the thought.

Flagg’s eyes follow Boyd’s and then He seems to realize. “Oh, how rude of me!” He strikes His forehead with the heel of His free hand, grinning dumbly at His seemingly innocuous mishap. “Hunger, you know? Makes me stupid sometimes.”

Boyd looks up from under his brows in a sort of weary supplication that goes straight to Flagg’s dick.

“Grateful as I am for your self-awareness,” Boyd flashes a patented smile tempered by some deprecation for his situation, “I hardly think poor table manners matters at the end of the world, my friend.”

Flagg tsks and shakes his head with a smile. “Ain’t that just the way with us folk?”

“Fewer now, I’d bet.”

“You’d bet right, but that just means you and I are survivors, and that just means we get to have this country all to ourselves.” It takes Boyd slower than usual to process this information - shit, for all he knows, Flagg is right. It’s not like he’s seen anyone else lately. “Hey, since you’re a betting man, what do you think the odds are that anyone will try to take it away from us?”

“Us?”

Patiently, Flagg replies, “sure, Boyd. Follow me and we can do anything we’d like. I don’t know about you,” (but he does, Boyd implicitly understands that), “but I would love nothing more than to take those mountains back and give them back to their rightful owners.” Flagg tosses his head in the general direction of eastern Kentucky. Boyd thinks he only knows that because his dreams say so. 

Stupidly, Boyd pauses and forces himself not to wonder why Flagg knows his name. They ain’t met on this plane. 

“If there’s anyone to give them back to,” he says, carefully.

“That’s where we come in. People will be gathering to those hollers give or take a month or two, and I’d like you at my side while we build them back up.” Then, casually, He throws in: “Why, I hear Raylan Givens is on his way as we speak.”

Flagg looks pleased as punch while Boyd visibly blanches. He ain't heard that name in a long time, nevermind Raylan was still out there. They’d made a promise all those years ago and since then he’s had a handful of tours and a prison stint to keep his mind from wandering anywhere near that man. Besides, he’s a lawman now - or was, last he’s heard from home. Now, he supposes, it don’t matter any more than the promise they made. Maybe in another lifetime.

“Aw hell, cheer up, Boyd! Isn’t this good news?” His grin has faltered a bit, and Boyd doesn’t know what that means for him, so he instead turns his attention back to the food at literal hand. With some visible pity, Flagg plays along - for now. 

“C’mere,” He offers with the crook of two free fingers, “you look like you need this more than me.”

Boyd can’t go anywhere else, so he pushes his face against the bars as far as he can while Flagg extends His hand in that He would approach a feral dog. Presumably. 

“Ah, here we are,” He coos. Boyd is a dignified man, same as any born to his circumstance, but they both know self-preservation trumps ego. He visibly delights in such knowledge as Boyd braces himself against the bars and feeds from His hand the drum. It’s easily the best dinner he’s ever had, right next to his mama’s cooking. Just as He’d hoped, Boyd locks eyes as he takes sustenance and catches His thumb in his mouth, a quick swipe of tongue that sends Boyd reeling backward as soon as they make contact. 

He only just keeps the chicken down.

“Sorry, not too much, now. Can’t have you getting sick - after all, we got a whole new world to plan!” He punctuates his apology with a quick and playful slap to Boyd’s cheek, and Boyd waits for Him to look away before he shudders. The touch is inhumanly cold.

Maybe it’s a trick of the light, maybe Boyd just ain’t had enough to eat, but Flagg wiggles His finger into a lock on his cell that can’t have been there and impossibly, it rattles open with a finality, no barrier nor cage between them now. 

Boyd stills.

“Come along now, Boyd. It awaits!”

He could say no - but for what? Make no mistake, something about his new companion chills his bones the same as chasing the seam of a mines, (maybe more than if they weren’t made of the same thing, whatever that is), and so maybe he’s boneless right now, among other things, but that don’t include stupid. Boyd can feel Flagg watch this all play out on his face - his poker face has declined some with his health, he’s aware - with a curious mix of calculation and amusement. Boyd wagers He didn’t think there was a chance of resistance and now He finds the idea a brief captivation. It’s the time stamp of it all that seals his fate.

 _Better to be the right hand of the devil than in his path,_ he decides.

Boyd follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll probably recognize this was Lloyd's introduction in The Stand, more or less - Boyd's now! 
> 
> Also, Alderson is actually a women-only minimum security prison for white-collar crimes like embezzlement (re: Martha Stewart), but in Justified this is where Boyd went for tax evasion. I took the creative liberty of turning it into a maximum security prison for plot purposes, and made it coed. 
> 
> Flagg is whistling Poor, Wayfaring Stranger.
> 
> Chapter title taken from Feed Me by The Wire.


	3. can you dig your man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for abuse and death, though hopefully this comes as no surprise as far as Ava's canonical storyline goes!

In her mundanest of chores, Ava dreams of killing Bowman Crowder. 

While she soaks their dishes in the sink, her eyes glaze over into the yard. The lights are on but she’s far from home, working out the logistics of what it would take to never feel his belt again. 

Tomorrow night she’ll prepare his favorite supper: ham, yams, cream-stock corn, and leftover okra over tomatoes. It’ll be at the table, Ava decides. 

His last supper. Her terms.  
  
\---  
  
It’s slower here in the hollers than it is out in Lexington. On the radio everyone is dying. “Stay home,” the CDC says, and Ava can’t think of any punishment worse than that.

But, Bowman calls bullshit on liberal media scaremongering tactics and goes into town for a drink like he’s got something to prove. If it’s to himself or to Ava is anyone’s guess.

She doesn’t try to stop him.

There’s not much in the way of music on the radio anymore and occasionally someone broadcasts martial violence that’s almost always cut off by gunfire and screaming, so she turns it off and hums to herself for the first time in the longest she can remember as she cooks. Be a shame to waste all this food on a dead man, Ava thinks. She’ll throw a party. Maybe a _my deadbeat husband is finally dead_ theme is in poor taste, but there’s no accounting for that anymore.

Bowman returns later in the afternoon with a cough. He’s drunk but he feels too under the weather to take anything out on her. Ava takes advantage by offering Nyquil, and he downs it, but it doesn’t seem to improve him much at all. As night comes crawling over the holler, his neck swells alarmingly and he’s got a fever hotter than anything she’s ever seen before. No amount of aspirin or cold washcloths help him. 

He degrades in their bedroom in just a couple of hours. He screams in pain that can’t be chased away even with drink, and then he cries. Sometimes he thinks she’s his mama and babbles about how she should’ve left his daddy. Once, he begs Boyd never to come back. Often he says he’s sorry.

She accepts no apology. Bowman’s more pitiful than the day he was born.

When she calls the mountain physician, he doesn’t come - there’s too many of them like this, that there’s a wait-list by now that they’re last on. _Call back later._

When she tries the hospital, the phone rings off the hook.

Can’t be helped. It’ll work itself out.

As she sets out their finest china and finishes supper, she turns the radio back on to catch the tail end of a tune: _bay-ay-ay-by can you dig your man?_ Ava sings along like she’s heard it playing for years and lays food out on the table. It’s a feast. 

She could eat. 

“Baby, how’re you feelin'? Supper’s on the table!” she hollers, expecting no reply but still hopeful nonetheless. There’s some creaking upstairs and she can tell he’s up and moving around, but stumbling. Weak. She hears a thump followed by a low groan and knows by experience he’s fallen.

When she gets up to the bedroom, the first thing she does is bring a hand to her mouth but it does nothing to squelch the rancid stench of his infection. He smells like carrion rotting in a shed. “Can’t get up myself,” Bowman grumbles from the floor. He’s sitting up, at least, but that’s about the only advantage she has. He ain’t a small man and she ain’t a big woman, but like she’s done so many times before, Ava hauls him up and all but drags him to the dinner table, sits him in his chair. He’s hotter than their furnace in the winter time.

She can’t tell when he’ll be lucid. Ava smiles placidly at him. 

“Are you hungry, baby? I made your favorite for dinner. You have to keep up your appetite if you’re gonna get any better.” 

Bowman sways a little in his seat, and when he realizes the food in front of him, he throws up right there on the plate. She’s glad she doesn’t instinctively sympathy vomit, too. “Oh, honey,” Ava says with some real pity. Under the pretense of relief she gets up to retrieve what to any onlooker would be a cloth to clean up the mess, but instead she opens up the closet door in the hallway and takes his deer rifle. 

Except when she comes back with the rifle pointed where he should be, he’s fallen sideways from the chair onto the floor. There’s no way he’ll live - he was never getting out of this alive to begin with, but she feels nature has stolen her final act of God. “Damnit,” she curses at Him. “Couldn’t even give me this, could you?” 

It’s a crying shame.

Bowman looks up at her from the ground. He’s lucid - for now.

“Please, Ava” he tries to gasp, but he’s gargling his own snot. He can’t get through his plea without hacking violently. “Put me down! I love you, put me down,” but she won’t. She stares blankly at him with his deer rifle in hand and when being nice don’t work, he starts hollering _kill me you fucking good-for-nothin’ cunt_ \- or at least he does until he chokes. On his side he projects unholy gobs of phlegm that look like oil paints squeezed from the bottle and he breathes a little easier. There is a rattle in his chest that reminds her, before she kicks him back over onto his back to choke again, of the child that never came to be.

She says _no_.  
  
\---  
  
Disposing of Bowman ain’t no easy task - it’d be quicker work to dig a ditch in her backyard and throw him in, but since their courting he’s offered no quarter, no dignity, and Ava is prepared to give as good as she gets. 

His body stinks. In the dead of Kentucky summer, he swells with gas and rot. At first, every time she tries to touch him, he squelches. Ava is certainly no maiden, but Bowman’s visceral detritus takes extensive liquid courage and repeated retching before she’s able to wrap him up in their heirloom rug and drag him out to the truck. From there on out, he makes it easy in that he slides on his own waste like the ugliest snail she ever did see and all but crawls into the bed. She thinks about covering him, but who among them is left to care? 

Moreover, how many have actually escaped his fate? 

These days, no one bothers with social calls - either they’re too busy coming down with Tube Neck, or seeing to the dead. Fled, if they were lucky, but these people are - were - her blood, and if she knows anything, it’s that they’re as unshakable as these mountains. No company nor disease could move them. 

She never has forgotten what they say about this place, and neither did her daddy, nor her daddy’s daddy.

If only Darrell Scott knew.

As for Ava, well, she’s never tasted freedom so great. If she were sure God had spared his shepherds, hell, she might even go back to church. Mass extinction could make a believer out of anybody. So maybe He wouldn’t let her have Bowman, but at least she had this. 

Were she anyone else, she might think _too bad it’s come to this_ , that she have her freedom over the actual apocalypse. But Ava has found, and not kindly, that maybe she prefers it this way - that they should die for their complicity, their silence, in her abuse. Not one of them did a damn thing, ‘sides accuse her of provoking him or judge her for going back to him. Resources for her particular plight have been in short supply around these parts, but never its people’s sancitomy. What a mighty smite, this, better even than Revelations could’ve predicted. 

Finally, peace.

And even though, realistically, there probably aren’t a whole lot of survivors around to see, the fear of witnesses still traps her in a way that comes as a surprise. She waits until nightfall, then, to carry out Bowman’s disposal, and by the time she climbs into his truck, she wishes she hadn’t. Something feels darker than usual, creeping around at the edges of her vision, and Ava flees back into the light of her home for first the deer rifle, and then two shots of Wild Turkey. She don’t know if either will do much to protect her, but she feels a little safer. 

She wishes she knew what from.

Unsteady headlights jump over dirt road, and though she has guidance, nothing ever looks the same in the dark. It takes a few wrong turns before she finds herself truly on her way to the slurry pond that will swallow Bowman. 

As with anything, it’s when she rights herself that something flies in front of the windshield - black and indistinct and it don’t look right even in the dark - and Ava screams, despite herself. “ _Fuck,_ ” she swears and comes to a halt so lurching that it throws the body around in the back. She waits to gather her wits about her (that is, for her heart palpitations to slow) and glances out the windshield, then goes after her gun, but it’s too dark and she realizes with another sudden terror that she don’t want to know what it is that gave her such a fright. 

Whatever it is, it’s gone now.

Maybe it’s better she don’t know.

That seems to be the worst of it - Ava doesn’t encounter anything else on her way there. The shadows are distinct enough that she can distinguish Bowman’s burrito'd corpse when she pulls him free from the bed of his own truck and rolls him down the embankment unto his polluted grave. 

Determined, Ava steels herself, and with one final kick containing all of her unbridled fury, he finally sinks into the brack. It accepts her offering with no small amount of hunger.

A fitting place for a man never going anywhere.

She should feel better than this, she thinks as the last of Bowman Crowder finally disappears. Her life ain't no Crowder’s - it's hard won. It's hers. 

She only shudders into the closing darkness around her.  
  
\---  
  
She dreams that night of Bowman shambling out of the slurry, dripping with slog, but his face is a cold void dotted by red twin holes. When he opens his mouth to her, it’s to spray her with thick, black mucus. He laughs. It’s not his. 

Ava keeps his rifle by her bed after that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help myself to a Larry Underwood reference. This will probably be the only iteration in which he shows up here, but who's to say! ;) Chapter title also courtesy Larry.
> 
> Given Darrell Scott's infamous song used throughout Justified, this is self-explanatory.


	4. let him be righteous still

**FLORIDA**

He travels by foot.

The highways are too clogged to even think of hijacking a car and it ain’t been long enough now where he thinks little enough of the dead trapped and rotting. He will.

He follows the coast north by night and very intentionally avoids the Everglades, though he wonders offhandedly as he passes them of the Crowes. If anyone can survive this thing, it’s them. The thought catches him by surprise much the same as Trips had - it’s been years since he’s run into them (never of his own making, but by God did they find themselves in his cross-hairs often enough) but knowing his luck, those wily sons of bitches are holed up in the swamps like nothing’s happened. Hell, maybe they don’t even know. Wouldn’t that be something.

They’d make allies perfect for this kind of world if they weren’t greater enemies, and shit but do they hold fast to grudges.

He actually laughs to himself at the idea he should find shelter with the asscrack of Florida and scuffs his boot against the road when the sound actually alarms him. Nothing responds. He’s not sure why he expected it.  
  
\---  
  
Tommy Bucks is lucky.

Before everyone struck ill, Raylan had been hot on that shitkicker’s tail. Twenty-four hours, he said, and in twenty-four hours the entire country fucking topples like God’s had enough of His dominoes. Hard to think he was just in Nicaragua not months ago now, explosives and bullhorns and federal warrants his narrow world. Harder to think probably Bucks had only faced judgment of the divine sort instead of the ancillary judgment Raylan had been about to serve. Something tells him Bucks wasn’t going to leave and maybe they would’ve pulled and Raylan wouldn’t miss because he never does, he’s made damn sure of that, and maybe even it would’ve been justified. Maybe he would’ve even lost his job over it but he could’ve dealt with prison transport duty if it meant that nasty son of a bitch was dead by his hand - no judge was ever going to experience the pulp of another man’s head matter sprayed across his face.

The memory - irrelevant though it is now with nature’s population control - wraps a stranglehold around the butt of his Glock and he roams the highway dangerously as if to dare the next Tommy Bucks to walk into his line of fire. 

The coasts aren’t safe and he hopes no one comes seeking them should anyone else have survived - Raylan can’t rightly be sure. Beside him, the ocean spits up bloated bodies who tried other means of escape, and none of them look even mildly diseased. They point to barbed wire and barricades he finds at strategic points on the highway. Shells both of the sea and of weaponry decorate the road, vehicles, and people that don’t exclude tads. Ain’t no law here. Not anymore.

Raylan throws his badge into the waves and doesn’t think about it again.  
  
\---  
  
At first he doesn’t remember his dreams after he’s left the sweltering sunlight of Miami - only that he wakes up with a vague sense of unease hanging over him, the very same he feels when he thinks too long about Harlan.

At some point, they shift to something darker, more insistent and he wakes up with a sense of urgency that doesn’t fade until well into the night. Raylan can’t shake the feeling that something wants him, something bigger and uglier than whatever hellscape this country has become in just a few short weeks, and he’s been tossed right in the middle of it all. The further north he traipses, the stronger the feeling gets - but there’s nowhere else for him to go. He doesn’t know where to go.

His dreams, on the other hand, do.  
  
\---  
  
_They’re back in the mine again._

__

__

_Raylan recognizes the scene immediately. Intimately._

_He’s standing behind Boyd, just out of reach of their headlamps. Raylan wouldn’t notice Him at all if it weren’t for those terrible red eyes. Before Raylan can say boo, He laughs. Its low distortion leaves a slick sheen of sweat on him as it echoes down the seam, and the shaft moans like the sick. Boyd is the only one who can hear it. Raylan knows what’s happening but he obeys the demands of The Dark Man’s dreamworld logic and plays his part as he did twenty years ago. It doesn’t strike him he can be anyone else. Do anything else._

_He’s too chickenshit to run and he knows it, knows what’s coming and he tries to tell Boyd that this is what meant to kill them here in this mine but he can’t say anything except to scream. The sound comes out too slow and it’s just a heavy breath trapped in his throat._

_As he ever does, Boyd takes Raylan’s hand and yanks him from paralysis just like that. Shale falls everywhere but on them, and this time it isn’t luck, it’s by design. Boyd throws Raylan in front of him and pushes, and Raylan’s reaching back for any kind of reassurance he’s still there. Their hands meet and for a second he thinks they’re both going to make it out the way they did - that’s the way this is supposed to happen - but when the adit grows close, Boyd’s gone._

_Raylan turns from behind the cave-in and wishes he hadn’t. Between falling earth, The Dark Man’s got His arms wrapped possessively around Boyd and with a hungry smile that makes Raylan’s stomach turn, He presses a kiss to Boyd’s cheek._

_Raylan reaches for a gun he doesn't have._

_“That ain’t how it fucking ended!”_ he screams into the light.

  
**GEORGIA**  


For what it’s worth, Raylan does try the CDC. He’s lived long enough - maybe too long if Trips is anything to go by - to learn how to keep his expectations below ground level.

By the time he gets there, everyone is dead. There are no immediate answers aside from bodies of nurses, doctors, and what he assumes were patients though it’s become hard to distinguish. He guesses the hazmat suits didn’t do much good if the mucus spray covering their helmets means much. Before the fear of catching ill again can seize him, Raylan cuts his losses and turns tail. He ain’t no scientist anyway.

Still, he gets the distinct feeling he’s just missed someone.  
  
\---  
  
Breaking into a liquor store is easier than he thought it would be. No curfews anymore when the South don’t exist. He don’t feel the least bit bad about it, neither. The dead are thirsty too, it looks like, because there are more than a few of semi-liquified corpses clutching a bottle (sometimes two) of top-shelf booze. “Public intoxication though it may be, I’m gonna let you go ahead and keep that so long as you stay mum,” Raylan negotiates with their silence, tipping his hat as he gives them a decidedly narrow berth and finds untouched Laphroaig near the back. 

“Cheers.”  
  
\---  
  
The horses are all dead and shit do they draw flies thick as fog, but the cattle have somehow survived. It makes him feel less lonely and simultaneously more alone than before. No farm dogs accompany them; he guesses Trips has been picky, considering. They’re stupid, and fat, and happy and they don’t shy away from Raylan when he approaches them. 

It’s been at least two decades since he’s thought of it at all, but something old and lowland in him rips from his chest, a hollering straight from the mountains that catches their attention. They perk up - who knows the last time they’ve seen a live person - and amble up to him. Some of the hardness in the last three or so weeks dissolves from his face and God help him, but he actually smiles. “Well, shit,” he replies to their insistent headbutting and lets himself pet them. Like so many other survivors (ones he’s not encountered thus far), Raylan ain’t been eating right after the abrupt collapse of capitalism. He very might well be able to eat a cow. They make it too easy to draw his Glock and put one in their collective skull, but their eyes are just too goddamn soft.

He holsters his pistol with a soft curse, a final pat, and picks low-hanging, untouched, ripe peaches from their branches instead. 

Turns out they go well with whiskey.  
  
\---  
  
He ain’t ever been to Nebraska, but it’s all Raylan can think of when he falls asleep. Ripe husks fall apart in an invitation, spread about him in an abundance of which he can only dream. He runs his hands over them and thinks to find the actual corn - it’s been awhile he’s eaten anything so good - but before his hands can make any work of it, he hears music in the distance. It’s an old, acoustic guitar dancing along to an equally old voice he can’t make the words from.

Raylan drops the ears from his hands, a bit embarrassed to be driven by such a base desire when humanity finally arrives, and follows the voice. He pushes through cornstalk and dark earth and blue sky to come to a halt at the end of a cornfield. 

Who knows how old the house is, but it looks like it’s been falling apart for some time, though not for lack of wanting. It’s a cottage on its last legs whose porch seats an old black woman that looks to be as old as the house itself, picking at a guitar with withered fingers. She looks as happy as a lark, too - eyes closed against the world around her and singing like the world ain’t just ended. The sight relieves Raylan of something he didn’t know he’s been clutching onto.

It looks like how home is supposed to feel, the way he’s heard it described and the way he’s never been able to identify with.

_In vain Thou strugglest to get free;  
I never will unloose my hold;  
Art Thou the Man that died for me?  
The secret of Thy love unfold;  
Wrestling, I will not let Thee go,  
Till I Thy name, Thy nature know._

It’s not until after she finishes her hymn and rests the guitar back into her lap that she notices him listening to her private concert and shields her eyes from the high sun behind him. 

“Well c’mere, boy, these eyes ain’t what they used to be. Been too long since I could see that far.”

Raylan obeys, and when he comes up on her porch, he removes his hat. His manners seem to amuse her and she smiles a toothless grin at that, her eyes crinkling upward and sparkling with something he deeply misses. Been a long time since he’s showed up at someone’s place on a social call.

She gives him a critical once-over that lays him as naked as the day he was born before her. Raylan does all he can not to shift uncomfortably. “My my,” she appraises finally, as if just deciding, “aren’t you at a crossroads.”

That takes him aback. Once upon a time ago, the simple observation might have amused him. Now, like any recent event of his life, it leaves him wary. “How do you know?”

“The Lord Hisself told me. Through Him all things are possible.” She states it for fact the same as pointing out the weather. 

Raylan goes quiet at that and entertaining anything benevolent or merciful stokes a banking anger in him he didn’t know he had before now. After a beat, he asks tightly, “The Lord tell you He was gonna wipe this country off the face of the map?”

It bothers her none.

“Got a temper on you, do you? Well, that’s jus’ fine, I’ve dealt with plenty of those in my time.” Her smile doesn’t leave her face and it makes him feel like an ass, which he supposes is probably the point. He apologizes to this dream woman to soothe his subconscious, if that’s even what he’s talking to at this point. Damn if it ain’t vivid, though.

“A lawman, then, are you?”

Again, her uncanny perception throws him off-balance in his boots, but he rights himself just as quickly and offers a smile sharper than any knife.

“Not anymore. Ain’t no laws to uphold anymore out there.”

“Only God’s own, child.”

“Well, that don’t mean I can’t try.”

Her smile’s sadder now, the lines in her face deeper and significantly more despairing than before. Maybe he’s only just now noticing. He thinks it’s on his behalf. “It sure don’t. I think your mind is made up anyway, but if it changes, you come see Mother Abagail any time, honey.”

“He’s got Boyd. I’m sorry,” he apologizes by way of explanation, and truly means it. What he wouldn’t give. It would be easier if Mother Abagail weren’t so understanding of his potent combination of grief and shame, would that he could hate her, but she makes it impossible. 

“I know, honey. I know.”

They exchange a long look. The sun is hot on his neck and he don’t know what else to say, so he sees himself off though he gets the impression she wishes he didn’t.

“Ma’am,” he concludes, and so does the dream.

When Raylan wakes, he pushes his Stetson back from his eyes and looks mournfully west, but ain’t nothing going to keep him from Boyd. 

Not even Him.

  
**TENNESSEE**  


The first thing he sees when he crosses the Georgia-Tennessee border is a barn - maybe even a church - that reads in huge, scrawling paint JESUS KILLS.

The prophetic message actually makes him snort. They ain’t wrong. Raylan bets the next handle he finds they’re all dead in there, too.

He doesn’t bother to find out.  
  
\---  
  
Raylan hears music again, and for a fraction of a second, he feels like he remembers it, but he can’t remember from where.

At first he thinks it to be his imagination, something he’s desperately fabricated to keep himself relatively sane, considering. But even as he lifts his gun to the sky and shoots off two of his precious bullets with an expression that barely flinches, the music will not be silenced.

He waits a moment or two longer, and finally, in the dark, he follows.  
  
\---  
  
What he finds is no Mother Abagail. 

It’s the end of the world, and pop-up churches are still alive and well.

He’s seen enough of them in his early childhood to feel confident enough to leave without feeling like he’s missed out on anything, but the way this disease has gone makes him second guess himself until he’s actually approaching this End Times tent in the middle of Tennessee. 

It must truly be the End Times. 

When Raylan steps into the light, he very nearly fires at the snake twisted around a preacher still adamant that not only will they be forgiven, but that they are God’s chosen. The too-long beat makes him feel human-shy and too feral for his liking. He holsters his weapon (one only of many at this point), retires his canvas bag, and removes his Stetson.

The preacher only greets him with a smile and the glory of God. It’s just as Revelations said! Christ is on His way! It’s only a matter of time!

No crazier than anyone else left, he supposes. 

He don’t let them save him, try as they might. Still, he and his sister offer a poor, wayfaring stranger a meal (“ _Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me,_ ” he recites happily) and their company is tame, considering. Epidemics do make strange bedfellows after all.

They even invite him unto their proverbial fold and offer their caravan for safe passage west - safety in numbers, after all. He considers joining for a short time until he learns God sends them dreams of an old woman, they tell him with a zeal of those who’ve lived through the unbelievable and found miracle in it, who gathers a flock to save this world. 

Raylan pretends he’s never had them.

Figures, that the first and only people he’s seen since shit hit the fan he has to wave goodbye to. He slips out when they bed down for the night and feels like a boy breaking curfew again for it. 

Better now before they figure out where he’s really going.

By the time he leaves the tent behind him looking like a boat on the sea, Raylan isn’t sure it wasn’t all just a fever dream.

  
**KENTUCKY**  


The Cumberlands return enough memories he’d forgotten about since he left these hollers - sometimes longer - that he no longer travels by foot. He knows better. He knows these mountains better than anyone else on their way to Harlan, and then some. 

What’s coming is a hell of a lot scarier than corpses in pickups, Raylan figures, so he don’t feel nearly as bad about pulling them out of their seats and trying their engines. Largely they don’t work. It takes several attempts before he’s able to siphon enough gas and find a battery that ain’t as dead as its passengers. Even then, the absolute normalcy of driving again (and back to his hometown he promised never to return, to boot) only intensifies how surreal his life has become.

But this he knows is real, because Trips is more fucked up than he could dream even in a whiskey stupor. The Dark Man has nothing on this, though Raylan suspects He will try.

Summer waxes yet but these hills feel darker, somehow. He never considered himself to be nearly as superstitious as the rest of his kin, but circumstances have turned on their head in a way that he ain’t so confident about anymore. Like a warning, he recognizes belatedly, something Raylan can’t name shows him a scene long forgotten from his childhood. Frances was damn-near rabid driving up the mountain with him to seek shelter from Arlo, and it weren’t just him she was afraid of. Raylan was only a tad, safer in a car seat, but something in these hills spooked her enough that she made him ride shotgun.

Heedlessly, Raylan throws his bag into the passenger seat. No sense in tempting what he knows is already waiting in the wings. 

He ain’t quick enough. Not yards later does an elk the size of a fucking bear come lumbering across the road. When Raylan slows to watch it cross, the hair on the nape of his neck stands tall. He follows suit and sits up. 

In his headlights, it stops, and when it looks at him with those terrible red eyes, he knows. 

They spend what feels like an eternity sizing each other up, though it can’t be more than a minute at most. Only when it unhinges its maw and releases a bugle hairsplitting enough to make even Heaven scream does Raylan, without breaking eye contact, reach beside him to grab something heavier than a pistol. The unearthly sound incites something feral in him, not unlike what he saw in his mama that night. In one practiced movement, he leaves the security of three tons of steel for the flood of headlights and lifts his hunting rifle taken off a long-dead fugitive. 

When time is no longer relevant, it’s always high noon.

Mid-scream, his nostrils flare equinely, and he fires a single shot into the pavement.

The emissary shuts up, as though wounded. The way it starts and bolts back into the hills like a real animal makes him second guess himself - that maybe he’s just imagined this all, this ain’t the worst he’s seen here - until he realizes though it’s been some time, this brand of terror is unmistakable.

It’s what chased him out of Harlan.

“ _Next one is for you, you ugly son of a bitch! You hear me?!_ ” he screams into the dark.  
  
\---  
  
The Dark Man don’t approach him again, but the feeling of being watched does grow stronger. Raylan steadfastly ignores it. 

He forgets about it altogether when he drives right back into the mouth of Harlan. Most of it looks the same - nearly untouched. Sleepy, even, if he didn’t know any better. He thinks of Miami, burning still, maybe burned - 

He doesn’t know what he thinks.

It doesn’t occur to him until he’s nearly there that he’s been on his way to Arlo’s this whole time. The revelation stops him cold, literally, and he stomps on the brakes and jolts forward for it. Raylan didn’t come here for Arlo.

He came for Boyd.

If the Dark Man’s opened his eyes to Raylan, He’s likely laughing. In an effort to deter any kind of provocation that’ll get him killed sooner rather than later, Raylan twists his grip around the steering wheel and continues on to the bottom of his childhood driveway. This time the pickup dies all on its own. He don’t even cuss. Hard to tell which of this is his own doing, or something bigger.

Without even needing a light, he can feel the undeniably heavy presence of those gravestones beside him. Raylan wonders if Arlo knew it would come to this - that he would quite literally die on this hill.

As his boots crunch on too-dry dirt, he realizes he don’t even know if Arlo and Helen are actually even dead. Largely, he ain’t cared and he’s not sure he does now.

There’s no movement from the house as he walks up. In the actual apocalypse, Raylan’s certain Arlo would come charging out with a shotgun and a fistful of epithets, but he’s only greeted by stillness. He pictures it with such clarity in the shadows that he blinks and it’s gone. This house is easier to reconcile in the dark, he remembers. Come morning…

As soon as he steps inside, Raylan knows they’re dead.

This, he knows in his bones. Strangely, he feels only empty about it, though he knows it won’t last. The lights don’t work anymore but he’s stumbled around this place in the dark for so many years that he navigates to the kitchen by feel rather than by sight. Wherever they are, he don’t want to know. Not tonight.

Before Raylan starts picturing what they must look by now, on the counter he finds a handle of...something, but it don’t matter what at this point. Just the weight of it in his hand is a small comfort.

Carefully, he retraces his steps back outside and the screen door slams behind him. It’s not until he grits his teeth against the sound that he realizes he’s been bracing himself. 

What should’ve he expected? 

He doesn’t know where he’s going, again, until he stops in front of it and pulls the handle to his mouth. Wild Turkey. 

In this dark, Raylan can’t read properly, but when he looks down at the shape, he can see it from memory.

**_RAYLAN GIVENS  
_** _Beloved son of Frances and Arlo  
1970 -_

He laughs dryly, just once, and polishes off the rest of the whiskey right there. Tossing it elsewhere - who’s left to care? - he sinks down onto the undisturbed earth and finds stability he didn’t know he needed against his own gravestone.

“You were right, you know that?” Raylan calls back to the house. Nothing replies. “Goddamn you, Arlo.” 

The yard swims pleasantly, and then it’s black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays! Whew, this chapter was a doozy! Raylan finally gets his own exploration, ft. the St. Cyr siblings. Hurray! Also, blink and you'll miss Stu Redman.
> 
> Chapter title taken from Johnny Cash.


	5. bond to lead the hand

Realistically, it’s only a stone’s throw of a journey - they could be there in a couple of hours if only they drove. It crosses Flagg’s mind but He dismisses it just as quickly. Why not play if He can afford it? After all, Boyd could use some warming up.

And he can in the very literal sense of that phrase. Even in the heat of summer he shudders violently come nightfall over the mountains. It’ll be some time before Boyd’s strong enough to come back into himself, the one He’s watched since his boyhood. Flagg will admit that their present circumstances annoy Him a bit, but physical fatigue is a small price to pay for a reward out of this world. (Gotta crack a few skulls for immortal reign, or however that’s supposed to go.) He only continues growing more powerful in the wake of Trips, after all, and He doesn’t think it out of the realm of possibility that He hasn’t yet crested.

He hopes - knows - Raylan Givens’ appearance will help settle Boyd into his full potential, but Boyd doesn’t yet know as much. Let him believe in comfort for now. 

He will need it.

\---

Flagg is chipper company. Boyd is too bone-tired to let it grate on him, and then too distracted by trying to reconcile what this all means for him. Nothing in this reality makes sense to him. He doesn’t ask the obvious, knowing full well never to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it’s Trojan in nature. Wouldn’t it have been easier to pick someone ideally less in command of the English language? Less combative? 

Less likely to blow shit up? 

When Flagg smiles at him apropos of nothing, Boyd stops wondering. If he shivers, well. 

He ain’t ate in a long while.

\---

More for Boyd’s benefit than Flagg’s, they stop for the night. Boyd hides his relief well enough - he thinks so, anyway - but can’t quite contain his surprise when Flagg starts a fire. He gathers wood first while Boyd settles, but He doesn’t bother trifling with the mundane, decidedly human motions of striking flint. Flagg waits until Boyd is watching, and snaps His fingers into flame. Rapt, Boyd can’t process much aside to wonder how He can generate that heat with hands so impossibly cold. He touches a furtive hand to his cheek before he can drum up the memory of earlier today (shit, it feels so far away now) while Flagg feeds the wood His flame. 

Pleased with Himself, Flagg grins again. Boyd wishes He would stop. “Pretty neat, huh? I learned that one in-”

“Yeah,” is all Boyd, uncharacteristically, can manage. 

Flagg don’t seem to mind the interruption. In fact, He seems encouraged by it, and, like a magician, has yet another trick up His proverbial sleeve (though at this point Boyd doesn’t think he would be surprised if He did literally pull another trick out of His sleeve). He settles onto the ground on the other side of the fire from Boyd and casually hoists His knees up. Beside Him, He reaches for a handle of Jim Beam out of the darkness and takes a long pull. 

Ain’t nothing in the world that can ruin His mood.

The blessed heat sends a visceral reminder of Boyd’s physical state straight to his spine. Ever perceptive, Flagg asks, “cold?” and Boyd nods, very deliberately keeping his teeth chattering to a minimum. “Here, this’ll warm you up.”

Like any grateful guest, Boyd takes the proffered handle and raises it in cheers. Flagg dips His head.

It doesn’t take long for him to get liquored up these days. Boyd can’t tell if it’s just because he’s quick to drink, but he starts to realize the way the light cast from the fire don’t play right against Flagg’s face. It reminds him of the shadows eating the gullet of Black Mountain, ones he fled across the world to escape. For a fleeting second, he thinks he understands what Plato really meant.

Flagg’s voice breaks his spell. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Boyd. Something on your chest?” 

What should be an innocuous turn of phrase becomes so oppressively sinister in this moment that Boyd grapples against the base instinct to reach for his chest, just in case, but instead he feigns exhaustion. It’s not totally untrue, besides. 

“Aw, c’mon, Boyd. You can talk to Ol’ Flagg. Shit, it beats having a one-sided conversation.” Very pointedly, He appends, “don’t it?”

Boyd’s smile is thin and wan, and something inside him begins to coil. “Sure as shit,” he responds as agreeably as he can. It ain’t his fault his company couldn’t talk back. Fuck, his cell at least echoed. A conversation can be had with missing syllables; he’s living proof of it.

Deftly, Boyd sidesteps. It’s not what he wants to ask, but it is something he does want to know. He’s loosened up enough now that opening his mouth seems safer than crawling down a shaft.

“At the risk of potentially undermining your intelligence, Sir, I find Harlan an unlikely destination for your...headquarters, if you will. Why not New York, L.A., Las Vegas? Any one of those would be more suited to the size of this operation.”

He tries to imagine Flagg’s vision, but struggles to think of Harlan as anything other than Harlan. Companies steal, and families scattered across picket lines die.

( _Thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be,_ he thinks from somewhere far away.)

“Do you know why I chose you, Boyd?”

“With all due respect,” Boyd says around a catch in his throat, “you coulda had your pick of hillbillies, but I ain’t seen a single one of us for miles.” _I would have said anything to get the hell out of that cell_ , he doesn’t add unnecessarily. 

They both know.

Flagg makes such a human noise of contrition that Boyd almost forgets who he’s talking to. “I like you, son. You’re a practical man, bless your heart,” He says with no small amount of condescension, and Boyd wants to protest he ain’t _that_ kind of Southern, but he ain’t got energy to be contrary. At least his self-preservation is still intact.

For an uncomfortable lack of words, Boyd takes another long pull on what’s left of the Jim Beam and closes his eyes against the mine-dwelling demiurge of Harlan, Kentucky. It had nearly taken him and another once, and he’s certain that It would again given the chance. He has no intention of letting it finish the job. “There’s something else-”

“I know,” Flagg states simply, as if Boyd’s but a pitiful tad about to admit the obvious. Boyd thinks about his life and doesn’t look too close at the gap where Raylan should be. No dry socket here. Instead of going for the low-hanging fruit, surprising Boyd, He asks: “you’re wondering why you, ain’t cha?”

Boyd is caught so off-guard by the austere nakedness of the question itself that he nods without consideration.

“Come here,” He commands.

Instinctively Boyd rises - it pains him, but Flagg ain’t got to know - and moves in front of Him. He swears where the heat of the fire should be bows instead to a cold vacuum. 

“Kneel.”

Boyd kneels.

He don’t know where to look, so he bows his head. The amusement in Flagg’s voice is audible when He catches Boyd’s chin in His hand and pushes up.

“Look at me.”

Boyd looks. 

He don’t know what he expects to find in His eyes, but is, recognizably, giddy joy. It looks human. 

Like Flagg knows, He smiles. 

“Anything you ask of me, I will freely give you, Boyd.” Flagg searches his eyes and it’s all Boyd can do not to rip himself away. He might as well be buck-naked. “I only ask for your obedience in return.”

“ _Ask and ye shall receive, my child?_ ”

Flagg actually giggles. Boyd imagines it’s meant to sound disarming, but he knows the sound of war when he hears it. “Wrong guy.”

To prove His point, Flagg pulls His occupied hand from Boyd’s face, and unfurls it to reveal a piece of coal - black as His eyes - somehow impossibly pierced by a chain. Boyd eyes it hesitantly, unsure what’s meant by the gesture until he reaches out and the hand closes back up again.

“Now, I ain’t no Raylan...” Like His fist, Flagg’s voice curls around the name in a startling impression of the man himself and then it’s gone in a private disappearing act. He has the good sense to look appalled at Himself, but Boyd knows better than to trust company men. Even if it is a cheap imitation.

From under His eyelashes, He asks, “do you trust me, Boyd?”

The straight answer is that it’s been a long, long time since Boyd trusted anyone the way he had before Raylan left. But the Devil ain’t interested in honesty; Boyd is quick to recognize thinly disguised commands. Maybe he even feels Bo’s righteous hand as he nods. 

If it’s the fire or something more that lights up Flagg’s face is anyone’s guess. All of the same, it reminds Boyd of looking too long into the sun.

“Tomorrow morning I’m leaving to...scout ahead, as it were. I’ll be gone by the time you wake. Not ideal, but unfortunately necessary. Don’t worry!” Flagg beams. “No secrets between us. I’ll brief you when you come home.” 

He watches Boyd closely for mental gymnastics that eventually conclude in a single question:

“I’m supposed to do this unarmed?” 

Not that access has ever stopped Boyd. Back in the old days - that’s what they are now, halcyon - he had men lined up and down these hollers, contacts halfway across the country who would run entire rocket launchers to Harlan County at his beck and call. He imagines such help is long dead now. 

Of the mortal sort, anyway.

Flagg matches Boyd’s grimace with a lazy grin. “You won’t be alone. I’ll be there with you in spirit!” 

From His hand - Boyd thinks so, anyway - He produces the forgotten pendant. As soon as Boyd reaches for it, He loops it about Boyd’s neck. “This,” He brushes Boyd’s chest so lightly Boyd could have just imagined it, “is for your trust.” 

Boyd tries to smile, but it feels wrong on his face. “Thank you, sir.” He doesn’t know what his expression should look like. He suddenly very desperately wants sleep.

“So good for me!” Flagg delights. “With this, now I’m with you everywhere. You know what that means…”

Before Boyd can bring himself to ask what, precisely, this means, Flagg finishes His own joke with an alarming cackle: “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Boyd wishes Flagg would smile, instead. 

\---

When Boyd wakes, as promised, Flagg is gone.

No evidence of last night remains, and it’s convincing enough that he begins to wonder if his hunger hallucinated everything. The only tether to his memories he has past the hangover hammering at his head is the anthracite hanging at his chest. Instinctually Boyd clamps it, intent on ripping it off, until he hears a single, sharp _caw_ from his right that jump-starts his startle response. When he looks over as unaffected as he can, a crow sits perched on the branch of a cypress tree, watching him.

Something is wrong with its eyes.

Only just able to tear his undivided attention away, Boyd turns the stone over in his hand to find the very same perversion there - a red bruise hiding in the center like a vein blossoming for the point of a pick. 

Watching. 

“Understood,” replies Boyd, and with a lazy blink, Flagg’s envoy takes off into the distance. 

Birdsong returns to the mountains.

\---

He follows the 119. Everything begins to look familiar again. 

When the jumpsuit starts to chafe, Boyd peels clothes from unassuming corpses. Some of them are still stuck with Appalachian humidity he surrenders to midway through and instead he finds decidedly drier bodies. None of their shirts feel like his, but he ain’t got a choice. Just so long as he ain’t a target anymore.

Some part of him earnestly begins to wonder if anyone has actually escaped the jaws of this finely-engineered super flu when all he finds for miles is dead bodies. It very nearly convinces him that he’s the last man on earth - still green, though he certainly wouldn’t say it belongs to God anymore - guided by some malevolent being he’s made up to justify his batshit circumstances when he comes up on Pikeville.

Pikeville is busier. 

The casual brutality of the city is befitting of its end. As soon as he reaches the university, he crosses the fallen students and their signs to find the fallen National Guard. He spits on them for all the dead of these mountains - of this country, or what was. A Pyrrhic victory more than a stalemate for all their troubles, but at least a resource for Boyd’s own. He looks indecisively between the assault rifles and the pistols.

As he gets to his knees, his pendant swings from his neck and flashes in the reflection of a strategically-parked pickup when any of this still mattered. Boyd looks up to find it blinking at him. Any unmined mettle he may have possessed flees from him then.

He offers his hands.

\---

The stretch between Pikeville and Harlan thins out until eventually there’s only one lonesome body both damning and damming the road. 

Until it moves. 

The body rockets up so abruptly that Boyd shrieks. The body shrieks back, dumping his precariously-gripped handle everywhere in the process, until recognition seizes them both.

After a beat of silence, the _person_ exclaims unprompted, “Holy shit, _Boyd? Is that you?_ You skinny son-of-a-bitch, you look like you been to hell and back, man!”

Boyd comes fast and hard to the conclusion that the apocalypse spares vermin. Of course it does. 

The something coiled in him springs violently out from his belly and erupts into the pause of humanity. His laugh is too loud for his own ears - been awhile since he’s heard anything like the volume of his own life from _before_ \- and Boyd collapses in on himself, hands clapped over his ears like he’s a tad again until he can’t see for the tears in his eyes. He’s being watched by a dopey grin on hair somehow worse than Boyd’s own. Boyd doesn’t see the naked expression of hope on his face.

Instead, Boyd heaves hysterically until his sides ache (not that it takes much these days), and then he gradually unfolds himself again. 

“Ah, shit. Dewey _fuckin’_ Crowe,” he finally manages.

“Why, Boyd, I think you’re happier’n my mama - God rest her - to see me!” Dewey pauses when he remembers the handle in his hand, none the wiser for its emptiness. “Wait...it is me you’re happy about, right?” 

Dewey is so sincere that it makes Boyd’s stomach turn. He does his level best not to flash back to last night. 

_Now, you ain’t no Raylan,_ he thinks a little madly before he snuffs the thought altogether.

“Yes, Dewey,” he laughs more than says. “Yes.”

\---

As they slouch together toward Harlan, neither of them beast, Dewey recounts how it all happened. It’s more efficient to list the living before the dead. 

Boyd don’t ask if his daddy lived.

As he offers agreeable sounds to punctuate Dewey’s mostly one-sided conversation and fields no small amount of “hey, you remember-?”s, Boyd watches from his periphery for any sign of The Ever-Watchful. He comes to realize the closer to those hollers they draw that Flagg effectively handed him off like a baton whether Dewey realizes it or not - the latter, no contest. Why, then, does he feel like _he’s_ the babysitter? 

“Boyd?”

Boyd comes to, sharply.

“What, Dewey?”

“I said, ain’t it quiet? Here, listen-” Dewey whoops, and his voice boomerangs right back to them. No bodies or traffic jams to muffle sound. These streets aren’t like Pikeville; they’re empty.

Everyone died at home.

It’s so still Boyd can feel all but feel Flagg’s giggle at the back of his throat. He tries desperately to will the hair on the nape of his neck to settle again when mountain sun stretches an unholy shadow down the asphalt and yawns right into the mouth of Harlan. Despite himself, he follows the shape of the crucifix to its endpoint. 

“Dewey?” he asks flatly.

“ _What the fuck is that?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy howdy was this a lot more fun to read/write when this wasn't our lived reality. I've considered leaving this story alone indefinitely. I've written, rewritten, restructured, and rewritten this chapter over and over again because I've had trouble stomaching the violence of this all - especially knowing how hard Appalachia's been hit. I don't want to say I've sanitized it, but I'm certainly more mindful of how I'm continuing to write this. I truly hope this story doesn't hit home too hard for anyone who's read, or will continue to read. 
> 
> Thanks for hanging in there with me.
> 
> Chapter title taken from Mick Flannery.


	6. quiet my hand unwired

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woof, this sure does continue to get bleaker. I needed a break from the dark both inside and outside my head, so I've tried a gentler chapter. I think we could all use some connection right now. TW for brief, implied suicide.
> 
> Chapter title from Mick Flannery.

When Raylan wakes, it isn’t to the sun, but to rain.

He groans and looses a string of colorful epithets more to do with the fact that Arlo never thought to at least shade the family plot with a tree than being hungover. Stolen cattle for _this_ , Raylan thinks with a derisive snort.

It only just occurs to him, then, that Arlo must have done this, too. He wonders how many times before scrambling over the top of his gravestone and vomiting bile onto the ground behind it. He used to hold his liquor better than this. 

Raylan spits for good measure and watches the rain take it. Then, upon realizing the implication of doing so, he laughs. It’s an ugly sound from something suppurating inside him.

Good riddance.

His hat’s the only thing keeping the rain out of his eyes, but the rest of him is soaked - he shivers easier these days.

With what feels like a herculean effort, Raylan peels himself off his own gravestone and more shambles than walks back into Arlo’s house. Everything looks exactly the same - a timestamp of _before_ \- except the exterior. The exterior looks worse for wear than he remembers. He doesn’t look too hard at the peeled paint, or the mold. It hardly matters anymore, besides.

As he pulls open the screen door, he braces himself in more ways than one. It wouldn’t be like Arlo - or Aunt Helen, for that matter - to go quietly into that good night. 

Raylan smells them before he sees them. It’s no small mercy there’s nothing left in his stomach to retch. 

It’s when he turns the corner that his lip curls at the sight, something distinctly animal. One last mess Arlo has left for him...Or maybe he’s counting chickens. Wouldn’t that be something.

His eyes rake clinically through the scene. He don’t need to analyze it. He knows what happened.

This is where it was always going to end.

Raylan peels off his denim jacket and tosses it over their faces, does his best not to gag. He leaves a watery trail behind him as he throws the screen door back open (harder than necessary, it whines on its hinges before striking the face of the house and collapsing) and treks to the shed off to the side of the house. 

He feels a little evil for thinking it, but a significant part of him finds gratitude in the world’s unceremonious collapse if only so that he don’t have to organize their funerals. He don’t even know who’d come back from then, before. It’s been too long.

He supposes this is why he’s in Harlan, too.

It shouldn’t be funny that the shed is locked, but Raylan still snorts. Arlo is a greedy son-of-a-bitch, especially so in death. Shame. 

He’d have been in good company, otherwise. 

To Raylan’s credit, he does try a few combinations in the memory of what civil society was like. It ain’t his mama’s birthday. It ain’t her death date, neither. He has half the mind to try his own birthday, but he realizes it’d piss him off either if it was the right combination or it wasn’t. Beyond those dates, he finds he doesn’t actually care. Stiffly, Raylan twists on his heel and counts ten paces before he turns back around. He arms himself then, unholsters his gun, and takes a lengthy, zen-like breath as he pulls the trigger - 

Once.

There’s nothing Hollywood about the lock’s defeated sag. He drops his arm - it feels so heavy now - and squares up. God knows what (or who) Arlo has kept locked up in there.

Throwing the old wooden doors open as he does makes him wonder when he started to spook like this. Winona would know- would have known.

Sunlight bends the shadows back out of the shed and offers him a glimpse into a hive of partially-opened gunny sacks. At first Raylan glosses over them. When he reaches across them for the cornered shovel from afar, he glances down to get a feel for his footing and starts at the sudden dark of the mine around him, its fingers long and its grip even longer. His heel strikes the ground and Raylan steels himself. His face twists into a snarl as he reaches again, this time his gaze hard and unmoved. 

It’s stolen; Arlo ain’t ever had that kind of money. 

“Well,” Raylan whistles balefully, “if that don’t about sum up what kinda shit you been into since I left...”

Using it on the house crosses his mind, and he won’t pretend he doesn’t entertain the thought for a couple of beats too long. 

He grabs the shovel, instead.

\---

She’s dreamed enough to know that Something approaches Harlan, Kentucky.

At first she thinks It’s a man. Across the span of a few weeks - though it feels longer than that and sometimes shorter, too - He reveals Himself to her in pieces, like cuts of a movie. Ava wakes to the distinct sound of boots on pavement more often than not. Sometimes there are flashes of a wide-brimmed hat, like something out of _Hondo_. She thinks He dons a suit, too, the kind she only ever seen from company men.

Then It shows her Its face.

She wakes that morning possessed by the urgency of survival, tardy in its onset though no weaker for it. Maybe this is how everyone in the cities felt, stockpiling for the end of the world until it didn’t matter anymore. Except the end of the world has already happened. Something Ava wishes she paid little mind to now more than ever tells her the world never really stops ending. God knows who else shares the feeling. God knows if any of ‘em are still even alive.

A storm rolls loftily closer. She smells rain in the air. With heady anticipation, Ava pulls as many buckets or variations on buckets she can find into the yard, close to her porch. She remembers the stories her mamaw told her as a tyke about the Great Depression. 

For the first time since tossing Bowman, she leaves her own holler with a gun and a duffle bag. She notices a peculiar lack of any wildlife on her way to the truck - it’s not gone, totally, but noticeably dampened. Muffled, almost. Her shotgun rides its namesake next to her and Ava tells herself she’s only going to the closest holler to the east. Folks in these parts had preserves she’d be a fool not to take advantage of. 

Now that she travels in the light of day, Ava sees no one, nothing. In another context, that shouldn’t mean nothing to her; pre-Tube Neck she could go days without seeing another person unless she went into town, herself. This is different. She gets the distinct feeling Something is laughing at her...maybe even playing with her. 

(She never wanted to be alone, not really - she’s just wanted to be away from Bowman.)

She keeps her radio off nowadays; it’s just static anymore. Instead, she listens to rain patter suddenly onto her truck roof.

When she pulls up to the mouth of her target, Ava finds another truck sitting at the driveway. She don’t think it’s terribly out of the ordinary, or know how long it’s been there for, but regardless she heeds her sense of self-preservation and don’t park there. It occurs to her as she watches the window wipers swing to and fro that she’s got no good idea if anyone in that house is alive - or there, even. Maybe someone here had the foresight she didn’t and read the writing on the wall long before they reached this point. It’s a nice thought. 

She wishes she believed it.

Instinctively Ava reaches out and touches her weapon. The solidity of it grounds her enough to take a breath and pull around to the far side of the house; she ain’t been invited in, and she can guarantee that even if the people who had lived here were somehow miraculously untouched, they weren’t unguarded. Not this house.

Realistically, even though the rules of this game have drastically changed, it still makes her feel like a crook to peek through the windows, and then sneak in through the back door. Ava finds it surprising that it ain’t even locked. It sticks on its hinges and squeals when she slips into the kitchen. The house sounds like flies.

Familiar though it may be, still ain’t nothing she wants to tempt. Ava makes quick work of rifling through cabinets and the pantry. What mold doesn’t creep onto, she tosses into her bag - mostly stale crackers, boxes of breadcrumbs, and homemade jam. Nothing particularly filling, but it’ll do in a pinch. 

Thunder rolls across the mountain at the same time the front door creaks open and slams shut. Ava all but jumps out of her skin and creeps to the back door. Out of her periphery she catches movement of a booted, hatted figure step into the living room. “‘Lo?”

The instant familiarity rips a scream out of her when she faces him. Her bag drops with a dull thud. 

“ _Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!_ I thought you were-”

“- _Him?_ ”

He has a face.

“... _Raylan?_ ” she breathes, voice thick with recognition. Ava’s not proud of the stray sob she stifles into a laugh. 

“In the flesh,” he replies, no less awed than she is.

With a few even strides, he closes the distance between them and pulls her into him for a life-affirming hug. She thinks she ain’t ever been held like this before in her life. Before they eventually part, she feels the brush of lips on the crown of her head. It’s not even until there’s physical distance between them again that Ava realizes they’re wet. Raylan’s soaked. His shirt looks like he’s been rolling in the mud.

Between them passes a volley of unspoken questions. Raylan answers the most immediate first. “My folks,” he says with a grimace he still hasn’t quite learned to tame in the moment. Ava doesn’t ask for more. She doesn’t need to.

“I’m sorry, Raylan,” she says, and means it. 

He lets her cradle his face. Ava feels him sigh into her hands for lack of words as he loops his arms back around her. After a beat, he asks, “Your kin…?”

Like lightning, a defensive smile flashes across her face. In its wake it leaves a heavier sadness that remains unnamed for now. She shakes her head. 

He makes another face in sympathy. Bless him, but Ava don’t have the heart to tell him she hasn’t thought far enough ahead to wonder about Uncle Zachariah. She don’t want to. What would it matter, anyway?

To kill any potential pity, Ava curbs his reply. “I’m staying at Bowman’s place for now. Bed’s warm and food’s enough for another person. Maybe we can get you out of that poor wife-beater, too, while we’re at it. Clothes might be a little big on you, but we’ll make do.”

“Bowman? Boyd’s brother?” he asks suddenly, and maybe even he sounds suspicious about the way in which certain events have seemingly fallen into place without his own obvious influence. Raylan inhales. “He’s...?”

“Dead.” 

“Ah,” he exhales. It actually makes Ava laugh. Like in the old world, he pulls off his hat and combs his hand distractedly through his hair as she tells him, “I ain’t ever seen such palpable relief before.” 

Raylan laughs, too. It’s darker than she remembers.

“Sorry, shouldn’t speak ill of the dead and such.”

“Mmm-mmm. That’s what they say, but that miserable son-of-a-bitch had it coming.” Ava tracks the storm brewing on his face, even if he don’t say as much. She gets the sense it hits home for him in a very particular way, if she’s remembering right. There’s time enough to address that later. For now, from under her eyelashes, she smiles at him. “‘Sides, I ain’t sorry if it means you’ll come with.”

She disarms him enough that Raylan smiles back - for now, anyway. “Well, when you say it like that, I might could be persuaded.”

As she picks up her bag, Raylan follows the motion with his eyes and comes to the naked conclusion of why she came here to begin with. When she realizes what he’s looking at, at least Ava has the good grace to look embarrassed to be caught red-handed, even if it is just for show. Immediately she backpedals, and only just stops herself from physically backpedaling, as well.

“You know I wouldn’t do this on my grave if I didn’t have to, I’m sorry, Raylan, I wasn’t-”

He means to sound dismissive, she thinks, but Ava can hear the clip to his voice when he says, “take what you need.”

They take a good, long look at each other. “Ok,” she replies after a pregnant silence between them, and punctuates it with a nod. She won’t read him differently until he says so. He doesn’t. She ain’t got time to feel bad anymore. Ava gazes around the house as she grips her bag a little tighter. “Did you want to take anything before we go?” 

“Not from here.”

\---

The best Ava can offer him is a bath of boiled rainwater, but it beats washing in a creek. Raylan’s given up on the lofty idea of experiencing a shower again. Beyond that, she’s able to offer him a meal out of salvaged foodstuffs (none of which have been taken from his folks’ place, he painfully notes) and clothes he’d rather not wear, but he ain’t got no choice. They hang uncomfortably from him. Make no mistake, Raylan is well aware that he’s good at taking what he’s - and he does get the joke, the irony is not lost on him - given. His name is no less than an art.

What does surprise him is how human he feels with his basic needs met. His hunger supersedes food; he has always been a man of want, he supposes.

The way Ava looks at him, she knows it, too.

When she reaches past him for his plate on the table, Raylan catches her mid-action and pulls the inside of her wrist to his lips. 

“Ava,” he groans.

He follows how her free hand guides his jaw to look up at her. He can feel the weight of his own stare.

“Take me to bed, Raylan,” she says.

By the time they reach the top of the stairs, he’s winded. He can’t tell right this second if it’s caused by the way she moves, but when he catches her waist and presses against her, Raylan can feel her ribs. They’re both bonier than they have any right to be.

Either gasps for each other’s lips while fingers beg for evidence. Urgency yields to vulnerability. His fingers come away wet enough to taste. Ava looks at him funny, and then walks him back into the bed. Between the mattress and her weight, Raylan folds, prisoner to her desire as she traps him with her humanity. He’s only just able to find purchase in the meat of her thighs when she sinks down on him and sighs like she’s come home, finally. He doesn’t know what’s happened to her, only that twenty years is a long time. This dynamic is bigger than him and a long time coming for her, and hell. Raylan’s spent a long time denying them both. 

As Ava blossoms open to him, Raylan is quick to recognize the space she makes for him to be the gift it is. It’s been a long while since he’s been exposed to an intimacy like this one, and there’s a good chance he never will again, so he holds fast to her as if she’s a whistle in the dark and buries his face in the delicate crook of her neck. To ground himself, he inhales. When he feels her fingers in his hair, Raylan untangles himself enough to lean up and capture her mouth in a kiss. She runs her tongue over his bottom lip. He finds her clit with his thumb and is rewarded with a series of sweet moans he swallows ravenously. 

She breaks away from his mouth to cry out when their hips stutter into each other, neither of them lasting very long. They stay tangled up much longer and catch their breath together. 

Ava is the first of them to find her voice. “Raylan Givens.” 

She’s cheeky as ever, but Ava says his name and just for a second he feels like a holy pilgrim instead of Mr. Self-destruct. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Not even at the end of the world?” he asks.

“Not even at the end of the world,” she echoes.

They go quiet, after that. There are so many things better left unsaid, Raylan’s learned the hard way (and Winona was, if nothing else, a good teacher - one he realizes now he never deserved), but after the things they’ve both seen, what good were social mores? ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ pardoned no one from Tube Neck any more than the Dark Man appealed to the good in His disciples.

“Why are you here, Ava?” Raylan asks finally, carding his fingers through Ava’s straw-spun hair. They all wanted out at one point or another, such was the lay of eastern Kentucky if you paid attention in school - his own escape was only accessible through Aunt Helen. After the past few weeks, Raylan has become acutely aware of his own privilege and his own hell-bent wake to Miami. Not that any of it matters now, he thinks more bitterly than he’d like to admit.

Ava twists to prop herself up on his chest and face him. “I ain’t running,” she supplies, trying not to sound affronted by the thought, trying not to accuse Raylan of the same. But he knows how to read between the lines - they’re often the only words that make sense to him. Before he can so much as draw a breath, she asks, “anyway, where else do I got to go?” 

He looks down at her, confused, and pauses his languid ministrations. “On foot, it’d only be a two-week trip west-”

“Raylan,” she admonishes, tracing gently the outline of his jaw as though she’s never touched anything so precious. The way she smiles, Raylan wonders if she knows something he doesn’t. “You didn’t come back to save me. I already did that myself.” She presses a slow, languorous kiss to his lips, and Raylan relents.

 _Better the devil you know_ , he swallows. 

Neither of them dream.

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know how many chapters this will be, but I have An Plan. Thank you to all of my friends for seeing me through this, and I hope I do both Stephen King and Graham Yost justice!


End file.
